Category Archives: Education

What are those white dots in my honey comb? When inspecting your hive first thing in the spring after a long cold winter, you may pull out a frame that looks like the picture below. It is filled with white … Continue reading →

March 26, 2014 by Anita Deeley | Comments Off on Marking Queens With Mike Palmer

Marking Queens With Mike Palmer

Vermont beekeeping guru Michael Palmer demonstrates how to catch, handle and mark queens in the field without harming them. He simply uses model paint and a piece of grass as his tools. After queen marking is complete, he explains how to safely cage a queen and her attendants. He stresses not touching the queens abdomen but instead moves her by grasping her wings and holds her by her thorax. Watch how easy bee expert Mike Palmer makes this look in his 2 minute video on safely handling and marking queens.

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Interesting Facts About Bees

It takes 12 bees their entire lifetime to make just one teaspoon of honey.

Honey bees visit 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey

Field bees visit 50 to 100 flowers during each trip.

Honey bees fly 12 and 15 miles per hour.

Honey bees flap their wings 12,000 times per minute.

Honey bees are covered in hairs designed to trap pollen. Even their eyes have hair on them! As they collect pollen for their hive the bees bodies transfer it from flower to flower and that's how pollination occurs.

Honey is essentially dehydrated nectar from flowers. Bees eat honey and pollen from flowers. They ferment the pollen first and mix it with honey in order to be able to digest it.

One honey bee hive visits about 225,000 flowers per day.

A strong hive may contain up to 60,000 honey bees.

All the worker bees are female. The drones or male bees have only one job and that is to mate with the queen. The drone mates one time then he dies.

The queen bee can mate with up to 45 drones. But the average number is 13.

The queen goes on a mating flight several days after she emerges. Once a queen bee is mated, she keeps the drone's sperm alive inside her for the rest of her life. She never mates again.

A queen bee lays up to 2000 eggs a day (an average of one every 45 seconds) and may lay a million eggs in her entire lifetime.

The queen bee decides to lay a fertilized egg which will be a worker bee or new queen or an unfertilized egg which will develop into a drone.